Adaptive Unequal Error Protection Based on Wyner–ziv Coding

Compressed video is very sensitive to channel errors. A few bit losses can derail the entire decoding process. Therefore, protecting compressed video is always necessary for reliable visual communications. In recent years, the Wyner–Ziv lossy coding theorem has been applied for error resilience and achieved superior improvement over conventional techniques. In our previous work, we proposed an unequal error protection method for protecting data elements in a video stream, via a Wyner-Ziv codec. This paper describes an improved technique by adapting the parity bit rates of the protected video information to the video content. The parity bit rates are assigned to the motion information and the transform coefficients according to their impact on the visual quality of each frame. This results in an efficient way of improving the quality of the decoded video when it has been corrupted by transmission errors.